SIG vs CAIQ: The Security Questionnaires You Will Face
Enterprise buyers send AI vendors a SIG or a CAIQ security questionnaire. Here is what each one is, how they differ, and how to answer both without stalling the deal.
If you sell software to enterprise, you will eventually get a spreadsheet with a few hundred security questions in it. It will usually be a SIG or a CAIQ. Knowing which is which, and answering both from one prepared source, is the difference between a two-week security review and a two-month one. Here is what these questionnaires are, how they differ, and how to answer them without your deal grinding to a halt.
The short version: build one internal answer library, map it to both formats, and stop rewriting the same answers per buyer.
What the SIG is
The SIG, the Standardized Information Gathering questionnaire, comes from Shared Assessments. It is broad and deep. The full version runs many hundreds of questions across domains like access control, data security, incident response, business continuity, and privacy. There is a shorter SIG Lite for lower-risk vendors.
Buyers in finance, insurance, and healthcare lean on the SIG because it is thorough and standardized across their whole vendor portfolio. If a large regulated buyer sends you a questionnaire, it is often a SIG. Expect it to ask about things a small AI vendor rarely thinks about: physical security, HR screening, and formal business continuity plans.
What the CAIQ is
The CAIQ, the Consensus Assessments Initiative Questionnaire, comes from the Cloud Security Alliance and maps to their Cloud Controls Matrix. It is built specifically for cloud and SaaS providers, so it fits an AI product better than a generic vendor questionnaire.
The CAIQ is mostly yes/no with a notes column, which makes it faster to complete than a full SIG. It also has a public angle: many vendors publish a completed CAIQ in the CSA STAR registry so buyers can pull it without asking. That is a real advantage. A published CAIQ shortens reviews before the buyer even reaches out, the same way proving reliability before references works, artifacts standing in for a sales conversation.
How they differ in practice
Both cover similar ground. The differences that matter to you:
- Scope. The SIG is broader and covers non-cloud concerns. The CAIQ is cloud-native and tighter.
- Format. The SIG mixes free text and ratings. The CAIQ is largely yes/no plus notes.
- Effort. A full SIG can take days. A CAIQ takes hours once your facts are ready.
- Reuse. The CAIQ is designed to be published. The SIG is usually per-buyer.
You do not choose which one you get. The buyer does. So you prepare for both.
How to answer both without starting over each time
The trap is treating each questionnaire as a fresh writing project. It is not. Ninety percent of the questions repeat across every SIG, every CAIQ, and every custom spreadsheet a buyer invents.
Build one internal answer library. Write your real, current answers once, for each control area: how you handle encryption, access, logging, retention, breach response, subprocessors. Keep it accurate and dated. Then answering any questionnaire becomes mapping, not writing. This is the same discipline behind answering the enterprise security questionnaire fast: the answers exist before the question arrives.
Keep the library truthful. A padded answer that a follow-up call exposes costs you more than an honest "not yet, here is our plan." Buyers assess how you handle gaps, not just whether you have gaps.
Anchor the whole thing to a real framework. If you hold or are pursuing SOC 2, most SIG and CAIQ answers fall out of the same evidence, which is a strong reason SOC 2 matters for selling to enterprise.
Where AI vendors get caught
The AI-specific questions are newer and less standardized, and they are where you stumble if unprepared. Buyers now bolt on questions about model training, data used for inference, and third-party model providers. The standard SIG and CAIQ do not fully cover these yet, so buyers add them.
Have those answers ready too: your training policy, your data flow, your model subprocessors. If you cannot answer where the data goes, no clean questionnaire saves you, because that is where enterprise AI data questions always land.
When I stand up infrastructure I actually control, on something like HostSSH, the questionnaire gets easier to answer honestly, because I am not guessing what a managed vendor does with the data. Own the answers, keep them in one library, map them to whichever format lands in your inbox, and the security review stops being the thing that kills your quarter.